It’s one of the oldest problems in the universe: Since matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, and both forms of matter existed at the moment of the big bang, why is there a universe made primarily of matter rather than nothing at all? Where did all the antimatter go?
“The fact that our current-day universe is dominated by matter remains among the most perplexing, longstanding mysteries in modern physics,” University of California, Riverside professor of physics and astronomy Yanou Cui said in a statement shared this week. “A subtle imbalance or asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the early universe is required to achieve today’s matter dominance but cannot be realized within the known framework of fundamental physics.”
There are theories that might answer that question, but they are extremely to difficult to test using laboratory experiments. Now, in a new paper published Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters, Dr Cui and her co-author, Zhong-Zhi Xianyu, assistant professor of physics at Tsinghua University, China, explain they may have found a work around using the afterglow of the big bang itself to run the experiment.
